AJC -
August 21, 2020
COVID-19 News from Around the Web
WABE -
August 21, 2020
AJC -
August 21, 2020
AJC -
August 21, 2020
Reuters -
August 21, 2020
Southern U.S. states, which were hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, are seeing a progressive drop in coronavirus cases, the director of the U.S. CDC said on Thursday. “Hopefully, by this week and next week we will see the death rate really start to drop (across the country),” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview to the Journal of the American Medical Association. The United States has more than 5 million cases of confirmed coronavirus infections, the highest in the world, according to a Reuters tally. However, Redfield warned that data from 21 U.S. states showed there was no drop in coronavirus cases for states such as Nebraska and Oklahoma.
AP -
August 21, 2020
As schools across the U.S. decide whether to reopen this fall, many are left wondering how to know if it’s safe. Public health experts say virus rates in the community should be low, but there’s little agreement on a specific threshold or even a measurement. The federal government has largely left it to state and local governments to decide when it’s safe to bring students back to the classroom. The result is a patchwork of policies that vary widely by state and county. Minnesota, for example, suggests fully in-person classes if a county’s two-week case rate is no higher than 10 per 10,000 people. In Pennsylvania, it’s considered safe if a county’s positive virus tests average lower than 5% for a week.
Reuters -
August 21, 2020
In a shift that some experts believe exacerbates already deep inequalities in the U.S. economy, more Americans than ever are working from home, and many are likely to continue to do so even after the health threat from COVID-19 has abated. With cases of the virus still on the rise, about 40% of the U.S. labor force is working from home. They are five times as likely to have a university degree as those who are not, Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom said at an event convened on Thursday by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank to discuss the future of work.
TODAY -
August 21, 2020
New guidance from the President Donald Trump's administration that declares teachers to be “critical infrastructure workers” could give the green light to exempting teachers from quarantine requirements after being exposed to COVID-19 and instead send them back into the classroom. Keeping teachers without symptoms in the classroom, as a handful of school districts in Tennessee and Georgia have already said they may do, raises the risk that they will spread the respiratory illness to students and fellow employees.
HealthDay -
August 21, 2020
Child abuse reports have plunged during the coronavirus pandemic, a troubling sign that the constraints of social distancing may mean thousands of cases are being missed, a new survey suggests. The survey, conducted by the Children's National Alliance, found that children's advocacy centers across the country reported serving 40,000 fewer children nationwide during the first six months of this year than the same period last year, the Washington Post reported. In 2019, more than 192,000 children were served by the centers while just over 152,000 were helped in 2020, a 21 percent drop, the survey showed.
AP -
August 21, 2020
Correctional facilities that resisted mass coronavirus testing for inmates erred in their decision to only test inmates with symptoms, leading to large initial undercounts, a recent study by the CDC suggested. The study released this week examined 13 prisons and jails in California, Colorado, Ohio and Texas, and three federal prisons in states that weren’t identified. Most of the institutions waited several days or weeks before the first identified case of COVID-19 and the beginning of mass inmate testing, the study found.
AP -
August 21, 2020
As hospitals care for people with COVID-19 and try to keep others from catching the virus, more patients are opting to be treated where they feel safest: at home. Across the U.S., “hospital at home” programs are taking off amid the pandemic, thanks to communications technology, portable medical equipment and teams of doctors, nurses, X-ray techs and paramedics. That’s reducing strains on medical centers and easing patients’ fears. The programs represent a small slice of the roughly 35 million U.S. hospitalizations each year, but they are growing fast with boosts from Medicare and private health insurers.
Reuters -
August 21, 2020
Researchers in Singapore have discovered a new variant of the COVID-19 coronavirus that causes milder infections, according to a study published in The Lancet medical journal this week. The study showed that COVID-19 patients infected with a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 had better clinical outcomes, including a lower proportion developing low blood oxygen or requiring intensive care. The study also showed the variant, which has a large deletion in a part of its genome, elicited a more robust immune response.
BBC -
August 21, 2020
Singing does not produce substantially more respiratory particles than speaking at a similar volume, a study suggests. But it all depends on how loud a person is, according to the initial findings which are yet to be peer reviewed. The project, called Perform, looked at the amount of aerosols and droplets generated by performers. The findings could have implications for live indoor performances, which resumed in England this week.
STAT -
August 21, 2020
If Joe Biden is elected in November, he has made clear that his first moments in office would mark a dramatic shift in the nation’s approach to Covid-19. Biden’s first post-election phone call, he has said, would be to Anthony Fauci, requesting that the renowned infectious disease researcher continue his government service. For months, he and his staff have pressed for specific answers about how many coronavirus tests the U.S. could conduct by January, when he’d be sworn in as the 46th president. (Biden’s optimistic target: 100 million per month.) And he has pledged to institute daily pandemic briefings for the American public — conducted by scientists and public health experts, not by politicians.
AP -
August 21, 2020
The coronavirus recession struck swiftly and violently. Now, with the U.S. economy still in the grip of the outbreak five months later, the recovery looks fitful and uneven — and painfully slow. The latest evidence came Thursday, when the government reported that the number of workers applying for unemployment climbed back over 1 million last week after two weeks of declines. The figures suggest that employers are still slashing jobs even as some businesses reopen and some sectors like housing and manufacturing have rebounded.
NBC News -
August 21, 2020
While Wall Street rewards big-box stores for their monster sales volumes during the pandemic — propelling retail stocks such as Target to a record high this week — thousands of the country’s small businesses are still hanging on by a thread. The widening gap between retail giants and smaller, locally run stores is underscoring the pandemic’s effect of driving a wedge between the haves and have-nots across the industry, as consumers shift to bulk-buying and one-stop shops. … Sales at small businesses stand at negative 28 percent, down nine points from May when it was at net negative 19 percent, he said.